For anyone who sat through Ghost in the Shell 2, you could be forgiven for wanting to kick your computer screen in if it means never having to come across another cheesy aphorism again. But bear with me, because the art=life stint took on a grim "fuck you" complexion opening night at the Civic on Friday, following the back-to-back screening of two riffs on terrorism, Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators and Michael Haneke’s Hidden (in order of awesomeness). Could have just been the size of the turf – the Haneke is as strategically vague as they come –, plus I’m generally against using grand historical incident as an emotional battery-pack. But bombings or not, it’s obvious that they form two totally different vantage points on terrorism as a m.o. in contemporary society.

The three kids at the center of The Edukators are for the most part stupid and annoying, and it’s to the film’s strength when it’s able to tap those hormones and ride them into unchecked abandonment. Hence, a mid-point change in structure doesn’t feel so ridiculous because it swamps them as fast as it does us. What you have here is constant balancing act between accepting and dismantling borrowed ‘60s idealism – and just when I thought I couldn’t take anymore corduroy-clad protest-banner-ready shit, in comes a fat balding executive to teach everyone about the virtues of capitalism. Weingartner’s beef is the struggle for something to fight against post-counterculture, with the trio operating in a non-threatening terrorist outfit under the moniker “The Edukators.” Breaking into the homes of rich people in order to rearrange their furniture – and thus sense of security –, things go badly when they’re inadvertently forced to kidnap one of their targets, and take him out into the countryside. The ideological blocking that ensues is worthwhile mainly for the way it details the problems that arise when a human face is suddenly plastered across your object of objection. Weingartner does a good job of holding his cards throughout, gradually unstitching hearts from sleeves in a demonstration that sex and activism don’t mix, but he just about throws it all away with an ending that collapses into limp-wristed pandering.

Haneke clearly wants to play ball, though. He generates a cloud of tension by carrying ambiguity through with a precision that’s like cutting diamonds, pushing the almost self-parodic aura of cool, intellectual detachment into a space where it becomes menacing: cf. an upper-class Parisian couple receives surveillance video tapes shot from outside their home, the likes of which we only become aware they’re watching when the screen is suddenly invaded by those squiggly lines that appear when you push rewind/fast-forward on a VCR (=persistent fear of audience never knowing exactly when the couple is being watched/self-reflexive acknowledgement of viewer-as-voyeur, etc. etc. etc.). In essence, it’s the opposite of The Edukators: as various skeletons make their way out of Daniel Auteil’s character’s closet, he tries to harness the abstract threat of terrorism by linking it to an Algerian immigrant he fucked over as a child. In the process, he also manages to cough up some pretty nasty hairballs, mainly re: the paranoia that comes with being a rich white person, and the way, when misdirected, it can send racial animosity breeding like lemmings. The things in Hidden thrive on this constant struggle between self-realized specificity and the possibility of dissolving into metonym: the way the couple’s arguments run laboriously through ‘nothing’ details; the husband almost colliding with a black man on a bicycle; suicide becoming spectacle, etc. We aren’t even offered the comfort of a calculated lack of resolve; these two paths just stop at the point where they’re about to merge. If their relationship says anything, it’s that terrorism is almost impossible to eradicate via headhunting; it’s a machine that will continue to regenerate by absorbing those around it.—DL